An Eclectic Journal of Opinion, History, Poetry and General Bloviating

Sunday, August 31, 2014

Detroit Does it First—News Over the Air

An early broadcast with the home made equipment of Michael DeLisle Lyons. Note the use of a horn to pick up music from a phonograph--the microphoneas we know it had yet to be invented when station 8MK went on the air in 1920.

On
August 31, 1920 Station 8MK in Detroit, Michigan broadcast the first news report Americans ever heard on
that newfangled doohickey, radio.The station had just gone on the air for
the first time less than two weeks earlier, on August 20.The Detroit News owned the infant operation
but seemed either a little ashamed of it or unsure if they had just thrown good
money into a mere fad.

In
fact the station was issued an amateur license
by the United States Department of
Commerce Bureau of Navigation, the agency then responsible for radio
regulation, instead of the experimental
license issued to other early commercial broadcasters.

The
Scripps family owned newspaper hired
Michael DeLisle Lyons,a teenage whiz kid and tinkerer to
build a transmitter in the Detroit News building
and even asked him to register the license in his name rather the company’s.As an amateur station it broad cast on the
fringe of the available spectrum designated then as 200meters, the
equivalent of 1500 AM.

Later
that year young Lyons and his brother Frank
built that nation’s first radios for police
prowl cars for the city of Toledo,
Ohio.When in their first use of
operation radio communications led to the quick arrest of a prowler and the story went national spurring
other departments to adopt the bulky, balky new technology.

The
infant station’s news broadcasts were read by newspaper staffers and adapted
from the content of the paper.At first
the company would not allow broadcast of any news that had not already hit the
streets in print for fear of “giving away the product.”

Few
homes could hear them anyway.The
audience consisted mostly of radio hobbyists
including other amateur broadcasts who were becoming known as HAMs and those who built their own crystal sets.Home receivers with amplification and
which did not require headphones was about five years in the future with the
introduction of the vacuum tube.

Despite
its limitations, the Scripps family was encouraged by a small but enthusiastic
response.They applied for a commercial license
and on October
13, 1921, the station was assigned the call letters WBL broadcasting at 833 AM,
with weather reports and other
government reports broadcast at 619 AM.

For
unknown reason on March 3, 1922 the stations call letters were changed to WWJ.In the following year the Department of Commerce re-organized its
assignments of frequencies and dropped
the requirement of a separate frequency for weather and government
reports.WWJ was moved to frequency was
changed three times during the late 20’s before settling at 920 AM in 1929.A war
time shuffling of frequencies in 1941 moved the station to 950 AM at which it continues to
broadcast to this day.

The
station has maintained a regular schedule of news broadcast through all of its
incarnations of call letters, frequency or ownership to this day.Since the mid-70’s the station, now a CBS Radio network affiliate, has
broadcast as a 24 hour a day news and
talk station.It remains a Detroit institution
and is frequently the highest rated radio station in its market.